How Our Pain Drives Us To Seek HIM

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What Was Happening?

As I wrote in my last post God – You’re Not Listening to Me!, I had indeed been very angry with God when I found out I was carrying twin babies instead of just one child. Even though Gary and I were becoming more and more entrenched in our wonderful new church home, I still believed that God was in a little box, just waiting to come to my aid at my beck and call.

But as time went on I began to accept that we would now be having three little boys instead of two, and that I would just have to do the best I could.

Then came the day when I started my weekly non-stress tests during the 7th month of my pregnancy…

I arrived as scheduled, and was ushered into a room where a nurse technician got me all hooked up so they could take a look at how the babies were doing. She had her little electrodes which she placed in certain locations on my stomach, and then she would pull one of them up and move it to another place. She kept on moving them around, all the while staring at her monitor. I started to get the feeling that things weren’t going as they should, but interestingly enough I was not afraid. I just figured that everything was going to turn out alright.

But then more and more people started entering my hospital room. The on-call physician from my doctor’s office was present, and by looking at her face I could tell that something most certainly was wrong.

What’s going on? I asked.

I was then informed that they were having trouble finding both of the heartbeats. It seemed they would find one, but then lose the other, and then when they would finally find the other, they would lose the first one.

I laid there, and I felt like I was in a dream. Surely this wasn’t happening to me – it must be happening to someone else.

But it was no dream. Then I noticed the on-call doctor starting to panic. I heard a staff person out in the hallway talking to Swedish Hospital in Seattle to see if it was possible to transfer me out there. No, they didn’t recommend it. What should they do?

All of a sudden my regular OB/GYN came rushing into the room. The staff had finally located him as it was his day off.

We need to get those babies out of there now! he said.

Things were such a blur. Gary had arrived by then, and he came into the delivery room with my doctor. I could tell the doctor was trying to keep calm so that we would keep calm. At the same time, I could definitely sense that this was a serious situation.

The anesthesiologist who had arrived quickly numbed me in the abdominal area, and the doctor started making his incision.

At last he pulled out the first baby – yes indeed it was a boy! We named him Jeffrey. He looked pretty good to me, although he was very small.

Then the doctor pulled out the second baby, also a boy. We named him Bryan. However little Bryan did not look quite right. His skin had a bluish tint to it, and his little arms hanging at his sides were stiff-looking, almost like sticks. He was so tiny – even smaller than Jeffrey. Immediately it was decided that he was to be transferred to the intensive care unit at Children’s Hospital in Seattle.

Jeffrey

Bryan

After the doctor had finished stitching me up, I was transferred to a hospital room. This was so unlike the first time with Matthew! No little babies were given to me to hug and cuddle, and as a matter of fact I was informed later that evening that they had to transfer Jeffrey to Children’s Hospital, as well, because his lungs were so weak.

Three days later, I got out of the hospital & Gary took me to see our twin boys at the hospital for the first time. They looked so small! They were both in incubators and it seemed like they had tubes and wires poking out all over them. I had never seen anything like that before, nor had I ever hoped to. It was absolutely traumatic.

I noticed on the large whiteboards in the room that there were lists of all the babies’ names which were in the intensive care ward, as well as what each baby’s disability consisted of. My heart bled for our two new little boys, especially Bryan who simply did not look very coherent…